Video cameras have recently enjoyed increasing popularity throughout the world. This is particularly true of small, hand-held video cameras designed for use by amateurs in the home, and also employed by professional and semi-professional photographers in non-studio locations. In these environments, available ambient lighting must often be supplemented by additional lighting in order to successfully record an image on video tape. Inferior lighting conditions often result in poor color fidelity and indistinct recorded images.
To reduce these problems, lighting devices have been designed to operate with said video cameras to provide additional lighting, thereby permitting superior videotape image quality. Such devices are typified by separate lighting units that are manually switched by the video camera operator prior to the start of taping. Because such devices are manually switched, they usually remain on until after taping is completed, creating a hazard resulting from the heat generated by such devices. In addition, in remote locations, such devices are often powered by battery, and the waste of power supplied to such lighting units before and after the actual camera operation presents a substantial problem.
Such devices also present the problem that the video camera operator may fail to operate the lighting unit prior to the start of taping, thus defeating the entire purpose of providing supplemental lighting to enhance image quality.